He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
---Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Done and Done (for real)

Even though I wasn't able to pass the test that was supposed to qualify me for the store manager position, the owner was desperate enough to take a leap of faith and give the job to me anyway. I do some more training the rest of this week to learn their tax prep software and some other things, then start for real on Monday morning. Wheeee!

And for no particular reason other than to fluff up what would otherwise be a really short post (and we all know we can't have that), here are a few brickbats found in some random magazine that decided I was a good candidate for them to send a free sample of their magazine to:

Feeling down sharpens your attention and makes you less gullible. True, happiness makes you friendlier and more creative, but it does so in part by removing a layer of skepticism. In the lab, sad people took fewer mental shortcuts: They could better recall specific events, made stronger written arguments, and were less likely to believe urban myths. Sadness "promotes information processing best suited to dealing with more demanding situations," says psychologist Joseph Forgas. "Positive mood is not universally desirable."

Someone should send a quick note to Eli Lilly, et al. I don't think they nor the legion of GP's who prescribe anti-depressants to everyone that walks through their doors ever got this memo.

Positive thinking can make depressed people feel worse. In general, researchers found, repeating a phrase like, "I'm a lovable person" only lifts your mood if you have high self-esteem to begin with. People with a poor self-image find the phrase so unbelievable that it reminds them of how they really feel - not lovable - and thus makes them feel worse, says psychologist Joanne Wood. "Positive self-statements, despite their widespread endorsement, may backfire for the very people who need them the most."

So if you like having front teeth, take your Little Miss Chipper routine somewhere else. You're really not helping, unless you consider pissing us off even more than we already are as helping.

Fruit juice is just as fattening as sugary soda. Eaten whole, fruits provide vitamins and fiber, but concentrated juice contains more calories per ounce than soda and a big wallop of fructose, which the body soon converts to fat. High doses of fructose, from whatever source, raise the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes, says pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig. "The upside of juice consumption is so infinitesimal compared to the downside that we shouldn't even be having this discussion."

The federal government wants to tax soda because it makes you fat. So why are they not taxing fruit juice? Can anyone say "moral defectives"?

Multitasking is a waste of time. People who like to do many things at once think they're more adept at absorbing information. In fact they're worse: They have weaker memories, are more distractible, and are slower to switch to new activities, a Stanford study found. "The shocking discovery of this research," say communications researcher Clifford Nass, is that high-multitaskers "are lousy at everything that's necessary for multitasking."

Which explains a great deal from why our schools suck to why the average office drone accomplishes nothing other than converting Cheetos and oxygen into carbon dioxide and flatulence.